United States v. Stifel
Decision Date | 29 October 1970 |
Docket Number | No. 19958.,19958. |
Citation | 433 F.2d 431 |
Parties | UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Orville E. STIFEL, II, Defendant-Appellant. |
Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit |
William F. Hopkins, Cincinnati, Ohio, for appellant.
Harry E. Pickering, Cleveland, Ohio, for appellee; Robert B. Krupansky, U. S. Atty., Harry E. Pickering, Asst. U. S. Atty., Cleveland, Ohio, on brief.
Before PHILLIPS, Chief Judge, EDWARDS and McCREE, Circuit Judges.
This is a strange and disturbing case. Appellant Orville Stifel, was indicted for violating 18 U.S.C. § 1716 (1964), by murdering another young man, Dan Ronec, by sending him a bomb (an "infernal machine") through the United States mails. The bomb exploded when Ronec opened the package containing it. Stifel had previously been known in the community in which he lived as something approaching a model young man.
Stifel was convicted after jury trial before the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Eastern Division. He appeals from his conviction and life sentence, raising at least two important issues. First, denying his guilt at trial and on appeal, Stifel contends that the largely circumstantial proofs were inadequate to support a jury verdict of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and that the District Judge erred by denying his motion for acquittal. Second, he contends that reversible error was committed by the trial judge in the admission over objection of the expert testimony of a government witness concerning the results of attempts to identify the source of certain bomb package fragments by a process known as neutron activation analysis.
The victim, Daniel Ronec, then a recent graduate school student at Ohio State University, was killed July 8, 1968, at his parents' home in Lorain, Ohio, by an explosion which tore open his abdomen and tore off his arms. A postman had just delivered a package addressed to him consisting of a mailing tube with a screw-on top. The evidence supports the inference that the bomb went off when Ronec unscrewed the top of the package.
Prosecution evidence bore primarily upon Stifel's possible motive for sending the bomb, upon his capability in relation to fashioning it, and upon the availability to him of materials from which government evidence sought to establish that the bomb and bomb package were made.
As to motive, the government presented evidence concerning appellant Stifel's relationship with a young lady named Cheryl Jones, a student at Ohio State University, to whom Ronec was engaged to be married as of the time of his death. This record leaves no doubt that Stifel and Miss Jones had previously during 1965 and 1966 had a somewhat tempestuous romance which she had sought to terminate in the fall of 1966.
Subsequently, Stifel wrote Miss Jones two letters which contained language which the jury could have regarded as threats.
The first letter read:
The second letter, which Stifel admitted he delivered by hand to Miss Jones, read in part:
Miss Jones also testified to a telephone conversation shortly after Stifel had learned that she was going with Ronec:
Miss Jones said that she didn't believe what Stifel had told her. Stifel denied that this conversation ever took place.
Appellant's counsel reminds us that all of these expressions took place 18 months before the bombing and suggests that they could not be reasonably related thereto. There were, however, some intervening events.
In December 1967 Miss Jones became engaged to Ronec and their wedding date was set for August 1968 (a date just a few weeks after Ronec was killed). Stifel learned both of these facts from Miss Jones, but there is no indication that he ever learned that actually the wedding date was thereafter postponed to the subsequent January.
Lawrence Meehan, a friend of Stifel's at Ohio University at Athens, who, like Stifel, had returned to Cincinnati, testified that in late May or early June 1968 Stifel asked him to accompany him on a trip to Columbus. Stifel told him he wanted to use the library at Ohio State University. Meehan agreed and Stifel drove him to Columbus. Shortly after arriving there, Stifel wrote a note, sealed it in an envelope, and asked Meehan to hand deliver it to Daniel Ronec at 982 Highland Street in Columbus. Stifel drove Meehan to the Highland address, but did not wait for him. When Meehan found the apartment unoccupied, he subsequently met Stifel at a designated restaurant. Meehan gave Stifel the envelope and Stifel put it on the dash-board of his car — never thereafter mailing it.
Other testimony indicated that Daniel Ronec was listed in the Ohio State University directory at two addresses — the one on Highland, where Meehan attempted to deliver the letter, and the other at 224 W. 32nd, Lorain, Ohio, where Ronec was killed.
Stifel's testimony when cross-examined about this bizarre episode was apparently unconvincing to the jury — and in cold type it is no more convincing to us.
A good deal of the government's testimony pertained to evidence establishing appellant's experience in handling firearms, fireworks and small rockets. While none of this activity (which appellant conceded) directly involved detonating explosives, the government argued that this background, plus the availability of Stifel's father's tools and machinery, was evidence from which the jury could have inferred that Stifel had the capability required to manufacture the bomb.
The government also produced witnesses to establish that certain materials from which the bomb package could have been fabricated were available to him at his place of employment in a Cincinnati laboratory of Proctor &...
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Stifel v. Hopkins
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